@gabbspalomo is doing a great job highlighting the work of others, so I thought I'd return the favor #TWS2020

1/4 While Gabby's talk focuses on jaguar and puma, she notes there is an incredible diversity of carnivores in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, from gray fox and coyotes to tayras and jaguarundis!

2/4

A series of Eastern Hog-nosed Snake heads from my MS research. This is my favorite species of snake. Note each is unique, like a fingerprint. Gosh, I miss field work with this species. Which is your favorite?

Maybe it's because these days I'm staying home one day a week with my kids to save money on daycare, but I really hate the "if you work more than 40 hours a week you're doing it wrong" trope on science Twitter. Sure, work life balance is important, and I am a huge proponent of this. I can't really work more than 40 a week now due to kids, but I used to work 60+ hour weeks and I LOVED IT. It's ok to like science, it's ok to get lost in your work.*

This syllabus is hilarious; I wish I could have taken this course: webs.wofford.edu/abercrombiecl/… More gems:

It's 2020. What can @ssarherps do to get Herpetological Review, probably the most influential journal in our field, indexed on Google Scholar? Yes, the Endnote library is super helpful and clearly took a ton of work. But that's a 1990s solution to a 2010 problem.

Look at this absolute chonker of a tiger salamander larave (aka sallywog) my awesome interns found! #UrbanEcology Also, I understand that some people don't like the use of "my" to denote interns, students, etc. But "the interns I hired, trained, and supervise" seems too impersonal and clinical.

Happy to announce our new paper "Anthropogenic factors influence the occupancy of an invasive carnivore in a suburban preserve system" is now out in Urban Ecosystems!

View it open-access (temporarily) here rdcu.be/b47dO or keep reading for highlights!

1/13 We used camera trap data from a long-term (10 year) wildlife monitoring program to look at patterns of free-ranging domestic cat occupancy across a network of suburban nature preserves.

2/13

CrossCheck/iThenticate picked up my pre-print and thus the journal automatically rejected my submitted manuscript...

for being too similar to something already published...

even though I explicitly linked to the @biorxivpreprint doi in my submission to avoid this... @biorxivpreprint This after getting rejected from a higher impact journal in which the editor referred to my 1300 km2, 55 preserve 232 random sampling location as a "neighborhood"...

Happy to announce that our new paper in the Canadian Journal of Zoology is now online:

Insular dwarfism in female Eastern Hog-nosed Snakes (Heterodon platirhinos; Dipsadidae) on a barrier island

nrcresearchpress.com/doi/10.1139/cj…

TLDR: Small females on an island in NY. Why? Maybe toads. Link to open-access version: nrcresearchpress.com/eprint/EUNPT97…

Winter on the prairie. Under that patch of buttonbush is some ice. Under that ice is some water. In that water a hibernating Blanding's Turtle. Here's another Blanding's Turtle, this one hibernating under the ice near shore in a large pond.

I miss field work. Here are some videos from last winter:

1) Mink in a hole
2) Mink on a log
3) Badger with prey
4) Curious badger
5) Long-tailed weasel
6) Beaver FIGHT!

I threw that last one in there to squelch any claims I am biased towards mustelids. Videos in thread. 0/6 1/6: Mink in a hole. @Nachusa @Nature_IL @NIUlive

Currently in the middle seat of a @SouthwestAir flight sandwiched between two other big dudes (all three of us are > 6' and 200 lbs. Despite being strangers, we have accepted our fate, and come to an unspoken agreement. Thus, our shoulders, arms, and legs are all resting on each other, as no one has an armrest. #flyingtall

Hey everyone, I thought I'd do a thread about our new Open Access paper: "Landscape and management factors influence the occupancy dynamics of sympatric salamanders in an urban preserve system"! doi.org/10.1016/j.gecc… 1/19

#ambystoma #chicago #urban_ecology #salamander @LCFPD In this paper, we analyzed a decade of long-term monitoring data from nature preserves in the suburbs of Chicago, Lake County. Specifically, we looked at two species: (A): Blue-spotted Salamander (Ambystoma laterale) and (B): Eastern Tiger Salamander (A. tigrinum). 2/19

Check out this great blog post by my two former interns. The things they hear from the public are comments I rarely if ever have to deal with. I can only imagine how demoralizing a constant barrage of comments like this can be.

https://twitter.com/FemFieldSecrets/status/1204385525311795200

As supervisors, how can we best support our technicians in this regard?

Did anyone else see that original 100 hour work week tweet as a cry for help, not a humble brag?

Twitter is quick to catch and run with the perceived implications of single tweets, without going back to the OG to look at context. Similarly, I feel that Twitter takes simple statements way too literally. What makes people think the claim of 100 hours was a calculated tally? Isn't the most parsimonious interpretation that it just meant "Shit, I put in a ton of hours this week and I'm burning out!"?

1/6: Like coyotes? Like campus wildlife? Well, here are some cool coyote videos from the outskirts of my campus.

@NIUlive @Nature_IL @INHSillinois #wildlife_biology #camera_traps #campus_wildlife 2/6: Like coyotes? Like campus wildlife? Well, here are some cool coyote videos from the outskirts of my campus.

I decided to have students "survey" two landscapes and create detection histories for each by flipping paper coverboards. I'll staple the two sheets together, and cut out the coverboards on 3 sides so they can be "flipped," revealing what's underneath.

https://twitter.com/wild_ecology/status/1196485352367804417

Then, students will estimate the average detection probability for the two different landscapes, and I'll ask them questions based on what is "most likely" based on plots 9 and 10 at each site (e.g. which is most likely to be a true absence?).

Yes, I understand the "backfire effect", but I think it's important to counter factually incorrect statements. Why? In public forums there are still people who 1) on the fence and 2) are new to a topic and haven't formed opinions yet.

Is there research on this?

https://twitter.com/wild_ecology/status/1188903534584090625

So, in a one-on-one conversation with someone I was actually going to "convince", I'd use a different approach.